Starting a blog

I have now spent 6 months working as a consultant at an investment bank. I now have some understanding of what 'life working in the city' is like. I am starting this blog to help me capture some of my experiences and help me think about things.

The project I was involved in exposed me to CTB ('change the bank') and RTB ('run the bank') work in one of the divisions.

RTB work: 

• Production outages:
• This meant dealing with production outages and being put through the outage process by L1 support (as they manage this process). The stress associated with an outage comes from 3 sources:
• you may not know what is connected to what - (there is a massive need for products that can help staff understand what-is-connected-to-what as dependency diagrams, ER diagrams are often not present)
• finding and fixing the problem (the code may be a mess, the developers may have left, you need access to a dev, qa and prod environments)
• applying a change to production is a painful process (lots of tickets and process hoops to jump through).
• Adding simple features to the existing systems
• Investigating production issues
• speaking to the outsourced user base in bangalore
• speaking to the outsourced dev team in bangalore

CTB work

• adding something very simple like a new attribute to a data entity can be a complex process.  The UI, middletier, database and then other systems that use the attribute all need to be changed.
• Managing the backlog of features that the dev team is working on

there is a lot more to write about this ...